Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/272

 264 SOCIAL STATUS OF THE CLERGY IN THE April dialogue, the best friend he had in the town, for entertainment at his table and ' two shillings a year duly divided into half yearly payments ' ; but something was expected in return. Some former vicars had been so stubborn and self-willed, and so prodigiously proud, that they have made no more reckoning of the mayor and aldermen, than if they had country gentlemen to deal with. . . and ... if we did not come to the place of hearing within half an hour after they were in their pew (con- trary to all duty both to God and man, and what is more, the ancient custom of this town) they would begin prayers. 1 A more humorous work is The Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion, attributed to Laurence Echard, which ran through many editions. Barnabas Oley, in his reply to Echard, 2 justly protests that poverty so far from being a ground of contempt is a cause of commiseration and honour. He adds, ' I have not observed any one thing (behither vice) that hath occasioned so much contempt of the clergy as unwillingness to take or keep a poor living '. But Echard was no doubt right when he said that landowners not only designed the weakest and most ill-favoured of their children for the ministry, but also made no proper financial provision, leaving them nothing to live on but church preferment. Their land descended to the eldest son, and their money was used ' for to bind out and set up other children ' in business. 3 When Macaulay remarks that ' a waiting woman was generally considered as the most suitable helpmate for a parson ', he forgets that such a position was frequently held by portionless ladies of good birth. Two cases may here be mentioned : Marie, daughter of Thomas Elton of Ledbury, served in the household of her cousin, Sir Richard Lucy, knight and baronet, being descended from Sir Edward Aston, father of Walter, Lord Aston of Tixall, by Anne his wife, daughter of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote. She mentions in her will, 1636, ' the quarters wages now due unto me from my Lady ', Sir Richard Lucy's wife. The other instance is that of Catherine Willson, nee Dyer, who represents in a petition to her cousin-german, Lord Cottington, chancellor of the exchequer, that her ' mistress, by a blow struck in her nose, had dejected her fortune in marriage '. Her father, James Dyer, was brother of Lord Cottington's mother, and great- nephew of Sir James Dyer, chief justice of the common pleas. As would naturally be expected, parish priests and their assistant curates married into their own rank, finding wives among the daughters of neighbouring clergy or in the class from which they themselves had sprung. 1 pp. 1, 33. 2 Preface to George Herbert, Country Parson, 1671. 3 pp. 128 ff.